


for you i'd burn the length and breadth of sky

by resident_longwinded_anon



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/M, Timeline? What Timeline?, reference to past amputation obviously, teeny tiny introspective fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 14:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17705708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resident_longwinded_anon/pseuds/resident_longwinded_anon
Summary: She doesn’t know, anymore, what it is not to love him.





	for you i'd burn the length and breadth of sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [partypaprika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/partypaprika/gifts).



> Dear partypaprika, this was a delightful little fic to write! It's way shorter than I hoped it would be, but I think I managed to write something that hit a lot of your loves in this fandom nonetheless. Thanks for the chance to write this, and I hope you enjoy despite the brevity.
> 
> Title from "My Medea" by Vienna Teng. ([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcYVef5KKN4)). It's a very Irene song, I feel, even if it may not be applicable to this fic.

She doesn’t know, anymore, what it is not to love him.  
  
He wakes in the middle of the night much more often than she, but on the rare occasions she alone wakes she will rise to her feet, put on her own dressing gown, and go to stand at the window. Her gaze will drift from his mountains in the distance to his body in the bed, where he seems so small in his sleep.  
  
It’s not when she dreams that she remembers his tortures, not like him. When she is awake, though, and he is asleep, she remembers standing outside his cell. She remembers the way he shook first with horror, then with fever, then with both at once. She remembers him, when he was lucid enough, hunched over the stump of his arm and weeping. He would pray to his god, tears falling down his face, and she would pray to herself and wonder: when had she stopped hating him?  
  
(Even then, she knew when she had stopped hating him. Her hatred had fallen away with his hand. By the time it was gone, she was left with only fear and victory and a small, distant thing that she would one day learn to call love.)  
  
She never forgets how much she hurt him, but in the daylight she sometimes forgets how much he still hurts. It’s easy to look at how capable he is and forget he ever feels that he is not; it’s easy to look at his mocking grins and forget how rarely they are ever genuine. Even now, he wakes some mornings with fear of her in his eyes, and he laughs it off, and she lets him. The only alternative is to hang herself upside-down from her own palace walls, and that would do worse to him than anything she has ever done.  
  
So she wakes at night, instead, and grieves for all she took from him, for all he took from her. And she gazes at his mountains and she weeps with sorrow for the fact that he will never go home, and she weeps with joy for the fact that he has found a new one in her.  
  
Inevitably, she returns to bed. He stirs - such a light sleeper still - and reaches for her. (Sometimes, when he is still half asleep, he reaches for her with his stump, and the tears well up again in her eyes, and he pretends he doesn’t notice.) “My Queen?” he asks, murmured warm into the space between them.  
  
She rests her forehead against his and shares his breath for a long moment. “My King,” she answers, and they both sleep once more.


End file.
